One of my favourite books: ‘Los renglones torcidos de Dios’

Alice Gould, a very intelligent, polite and wealthy woman, is a detective who is admitted in an insane asylum near Zamora to continue with the inquiry of a murder. However, she is diagnosed with paranoia. This is the scene we find when we start reading Los renglones torcidos de Dios, the ninth novel by Torcuato Luca de Tena (Madrid, 1923 –1995).

With a fake application form, Alice achieves to enter the sanatorium, but she doesn’t take into account the absence of her accomplice. How is she going to prove her sanity now? While she discovers the way, she will live and deal with mad people, diagnoses sessions, treatments, nurses and psychiatrists. By using her cleverness, she will struggle dialectically more and more strongly to persuade the doctors of her sanity.

The accurate descriptions of patients, symptoms and therapies are due to the eighteen days Torcuato Luca de Tena spent in a madhouse before writing the book. Besides, Los renglones torcidos de Dios has the atractiveness of inviting the reader, from the very beginning, to join the interesting game of distinguishing sanity from madness.

Reading Los renglones torcidos de Dios will make us absolutely doubt about the real state of Alice’s mind page by page. I highly recommend it because I literally could not put it down! At the end of the book, you will wonder who is crazier, the sanatorium’s patients or the rest of the people who seem to be healthy.